Word of Wisdom: Invest
“Your success in investing will depend in part on your character and guts and in part on your ability to realize, at the height of ebullience and the depth of despair alike, that this too shall pass.” Jack Bogle
Recently I was talking to a friend, an impressive guy who was a star high school athlete, built a successful law practice, and recently launched a Bible teaching ministry while being very vulnerable about his own personal struggles throughout his life.
We were sharing a meal and catching up on family news, which for him included several college-aged kids and some of the highs and lows they’d walked through of late. He mentioned the pressures of running a business, paying a few truckloads of tuition, and just keeping things moving right now.
“Honestly, I feel like everything’s an expense these days, and I’m treading just to keep my head above the water,” he exhaled with a decidedly exhausted inflection.
Many of us can relate. In this stage of life, we’re launching ventures, managing people, raising tweens and teens, navigating the ups and downs of marriage, and oh-by-the-way assisting parents as they age and fielding increasing requests for charitable giving and philanthropic service.
Others of us are carrying a different load. Maybe the pain of divorce, or the still-yet-to-be-fulfilled desire for a spouse. Perhaps the difficult work of picking up the pieces from a failed deal or enterprise, or the gut punch of a personal or professional betrayal. Possibly the numbing prospect of still trying to figure out a way forward here in midlife, while other peers seem to be firing on all cylinders.
My friend’s comment that it seems “everything’s an expense” certainly resonated with me, but also got me thinking. Why is it that everything feels like an expense? Because everything is? Or because my perspective makes it seem that way? So I investigated.
Turns out, it might be a bit of both.
The English word “expense” comes from a Latin root meaning “to pay or draw out of”—the prefix “ex-” meaning “out”, as in exit, example, and exegesis. It helps us understand why a true cost seems to hurt, something we have to grin and bear: because something is being taken “out of” us—we’re losing something that was previously “in” us.
Which, naturally, led me to the word “invest”.
While an “expense” is something taken out, clearly an investment is something put “in-”…but into what? Different clothing, as it happens. An “in-vestment” is putting something into a different vestment, different clothing…a different form. Such as “reclothing” cash into shares of a company. Or debt capital into real estate. Or your time and talent into a salary. Our investment is essentially an act of taking one asset and clothing it with the form of another asset.
Importantly, though, an asset we have an interest in. Whereas an expense is “out the door”, as it were, an investment is still in our portfolio, still something we can see a return on.
And that begs the question, “What are we seeking a return on?”
For too many in life, it’s primarily financial assets, or other things with a return that’s easily measured: titles and toys; followers and fame; zeroes and zip codes; acquisitions and achievements. When we skew toward that perspective (which, for me, is one I need to resist moment by moment), it’s easy to feel like we’re drowning in expenses regarding the other outlays outside of those categories—and especially the outlays into people and relationships, which can so often disappoint.
But if our vantage point is shared with the Divine One, our “in-vestments” into the safety, growth, healing, maturation, and redemption of people and relationships need not feel like an expense taken out of us and lost forever—no matter the time horizon. They become literally a reclothing of momentary mammon, energy, and emotions into the beauty of the everlasting renewal of all things that is yet to be revealed.
This is how a father secure in his sonship invests, because it is how the Father and the Son invest. Just as the Son emptied Himself, took the form of a servant, reclothing Himself with humanity, we are investing as a father when we reclothe our assets—our money, time, attention, affection—into the people around us for their growth, fullness, and flourishing.
Our investments will soon turn into expenses, however, if we do not remain connected to the life of the Son, if we are not feasting as a son at the table of the Father. None of us can pour out continually, none of us can afford unending outlays on our own. We need regular infusions of spiritual and relational capital to be positioned to invest it into others.
We need living water flowing into and out of us; then, we will be a river to our people.
“Before he left, he called together ten of his servants and divided among them ten pounds of silver, saying, ‘Invest this for me while I am gone.’” Luke 19:13 (NLT)